I'm Managing Editor for Business News at Forbes, helping to lead our print and online coverage of everything from Detroit to Washington to Hollywood. Previously I directed online news for The New York Times, was business editor of NYTimes.com and co-founded DealBook, a popular information service for Wall Street. Follow me on Twitter: @danbigman

11/15/2012 @ 9:27AM5,833 views

iFellas: NYPost Says Crooks Stole 3,600 iPad Minis From JFK Airport

Investors who have voted Apple shares down by more than 24% in the last month may not be fans of the newly-released iPad Mini, but not everyone is disappointed with the product.

The New York Post says this morning that Apple got hit in a Goodfellas-style raid by a pair of crooks at New York‘s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday night, who stole a shipment of the tablets that was coming into the U.S. for the holiday season.

According to The Post, the crooks arrived at a airport warehouse around 11 PM in a white tractor trailer “with the name CEVA on the side” and grabbed about 3,600 of the newly-minted iPad Minis, which had just landed from manufacturing facilities in China. They used the building’s own forklift for the raid, The Post says.

“They might have gotten more, but the thieves drove off leaving three more pallets of the Apple tablets behind after they were challenged by an airport worker returning from dinner,” the Post reported, citing sources familiar with the investigation. As of last night, the robbers were still at large. The iPads are worth about $1.5 million.

JFK, one of the largest international air cargo facilities in the United States, has a history of headline-grabbing crimes. The warehouse where the iPads were taken, building 261, is the same building robbed in the famous 1978 Lufthansa heist, where a small team of mobsters stole almost $6 million in cash and jewels. The heist, later featured in the film GoodFellas, was among the largest in American history.

The theft is, of course, meaningless to Apple’s holiday sales. Though the iPad Minis were likely among the first to land in the United States (Apple Insider reports that customers were informed Tuesday that new tablets were enroute), Apple sold more than 3 million of the units within just a couple days of unveiling it in late October.

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The IDs of all those units should be known by Apple and so Apple should simply refuse to allow them access to iTunes, the App store, and iCloud. Or perhaps do allow for a period long enough to track them down. Apple products are the last thing I’d steal, as the potential to be tracked down is quite large.